February 4, 2014

With the 100th anniversary of World War I upcoming and old enmities between America and Russia resurging in contemporary form—for example, Glenn Beck recently said, “I will stand with GLAAD against…hetero-fascism” in Russia—due to the approach of that gayest of sporting events, the Winter Olympics, I thought it worth taking a look back at the war that didn’t happen: the one between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

So I dug out my battered copy of Sir John Hackett’s 1978 sci-fi novel, The Third World War: August 1985, which scared the hell out of me when I received it as a Christmas present on December 25, 1979, the day the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. ...

This bestseller is little remembered today, although its dry, logistics-oriented tale pleading for more defense spending has enjoyed an odd afterlife by inspiring Max Brooks’s zombie apocalypse novel World War Z that became last summer’s Brad Pitt blockbuster (which has provided me with no end of punning titles such as “World War G” and “World War T”).

I hadn't consciously been aware that Max Brooks was so influenced by Sir John's book, but it all made sense on a Plate of Shrimp level, hence all my World War G / World War T riffing.

A lot things turn out to be less random than you'd think. For example, Hackett has the Soviets finally stopped by West German reservists at a river in the Netherlands, just as Hackett's brigade was stopped by Germans at a river in the Netherlands when they parachuted in during Operation Market Garden in September 1944.

By the way, one of the great works of British boys' literature, Richard Adams' talking rabbit novel Watership Down, is an allegory of the paratroopers' terrified retreat from the bridge too far.

52 comments:

Oswald Spengler
said...

There was an updated version of Sir John Hackett's mockumentuary war novel called "The Third World War: The Untold Story," released in 1982. The basic plot line in "The Untold Story" remains the same as the 1978 original. However, "'The Untold Story' was written with the hindsight of what were, at the time, recent geopolitical and technological developments. Hackett wove in more contemporary themes including the rise of Solidarity in Poland, and the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War. There is also some material based on the proposed militarization of space, and on the participation of Ireland and Sweden. Unlike the earlier novel, 'The Untold Story' elaborates more on Soviet planning and doctrine."

Also, included in "The Untold Story" is a separate alternative, darker scenario in which a USSR and the Warsaw Pact blitzkrieg quickly overruns Western Europe, forcing the US, UK and the Allies to sue for peace.

De Gaulle's Force de Frappe, and independent nuclear weapons, were designed to make Russia think twice about nuking or attacking France. While conventionally they were no match, would even a Stalin figure trade Moscow for Paris? Could he survive personally and politically (the two are the same)?

However Hackett's moral; that it is better to be armed and strong enough to deter attack, still stands the test of time. Unilateral disarment only gets one eaten.

In retrospect, the Soviets were using their hard power way too much, invading and propping up countries in the Third World. This was expensive and not very productive. The should have used their soft power a-lot more against the USA. These would have included:

Continuing to use Western intellectuals and press to do propaganda wok for them. This would have included Hollywood and the music industry.

Encourage mass immigration into the west. This would have, as we have seen since, totally undercut the middle class of Western Europe and the USA.

Encourage the social decadence and demographic crises that are affecting the West.

Encourage business interests to undermine the West. As we have seen since, they were all to eager to do that.----------------

John Mearsheimer of Israel Lobby infamy used to study tank-war scenarios before the Cold War ended.

His first book Conventional Deterrence (1983) argued that the Soviets would not be able to successfully implement a tank-based blitzkrieg operation in Central Europe, and they probably knew this.

In his Power Politics seminar (which I attended) Mearsheimer repeatedly made the point that the Germans didn't stop being frighteningly good at tank warfare just because they weren't Nazis anymore, and we had more Germans than the Soviets did.

"The experience of conservatives reacting to liberal dominance of major institutions and creating its own counterculture has largely failed."

Mmmhmmm, and...

The problem is we never set up anything of comparable caliber, and marginalized ourselves/got rolled.

Too much Noticing was goin' on. We had to let some folks go, Patty. Not much of a "counterculture" when the "counter" is sent packing to blogosphere Siberia because they're now with the "hetero-fascist" kulaks.

Where is our Harvard, our New York Times, our Hollywood, our Silicon Valley? Owning the commanding heights of culture, it matters.

Yes, it does matter. But wait, Avik Roy chimes in after being told it is impossible for conservatives to infiltrate the Commanding Heights of Progress:

They already do; but not enough. History shows that discriminatory institutions can be overcome by hard work.

As the only left-wing War Nerd aside from John Dolan's alter ego, I ate this book up in junior high and vastly preferred Hackett's dry style to Clancy's weird Icelandic rape fantasies in Red Storm Rising (though the whole refloating of the Enterprise thing was awesome.)

Now you're reminding me of it and making me really miss the Cold War, nuclear terror and all.

Steve, you and I are of approximately the same vintage so you might have done the same but back in 1972-78 we used to play Avalon Hill games. Many of the games where developed by Colonels and Generals, both Allied and Axis, and were attempts to create as realistic war games as possible. I had one friend who had an older brother that put plywood over a pool table and played out WW2 on the Eastern front. I think it was broken down into either division or battalion sized units. All it took was one guy knocking over the board to create Armageddon.

"Mearsheimer repeatedly made the point that the Germans didn't stop being frighteningly good at tank warfare just because they weren't Nazis anymore, and we had more Germans than the Soviets did."

In Hackett's book, the Soviet tanks are finally stopped by West German reservists fighting in the Netherlands, which is pretty much what happened to Hackett himself when he and his men parachuted into the Netherlands in 1944: even obscure German units turned out to be awfully tough.

To aid secessionists, the Republican president dispatches a few US Marines across the Italian border into Slovenia, where they unexpectedly stumble into a firefight with Soviet armor.

Was the USMC specifically mentioned in this book, or did you just happen to write it down this way? I'm surprised someone who is an expert on NATO and the Cold War would give such a central role to the USMC.

In retrospect, the Soviets were using their hard power way too much, invading and propping up countries in the Third World. This was expensive and not very productive. The should have used their soft power a-lot more against the USA. These would have included:

What about the USA? We used hard power in Korea and Vietnam and had almost 90K KIA combined.

I read Hackett's book & Clancy's 'Red Storm Rising.' I felt a rather cozy connection with Clancy's Air Force weather service lieutenant in Iceland retreating to the hinterland & finding a way to report Soviet amphibious invasion actions to U.S./NATO commanders, because I had served in the (now long deactivated) Naval Weather Service.

The Red Army was enormous, but one thing about that a lot of Cold War Western authors may not have known is that many of the Soviets' sophisticated weapons systems were plagued by shoddy workmanship, niggardly quality control, breakdown rates that would never have been acceptable in Western forces, grossly inadequate supply of replacement parts, & poorly trained operators (affected by budget constraints on training exercises); plus, the Soviets never developed the capability to recover and rapidly mend their battle-damaged armor, depending instead on sheer mass & disposability of stricken vehicles. This state of affairs was particularly bad in Admiral Gorshkov's too-rapidly expanded fleet, & was especially bad in Soviet nuclear submarines which, often enough, proved in peacetime to be death traps for their crews.

Also, the Red Air Force was doctrinally tethered to its ground based operational control centers, most of which were not equipped or rehearsed for mass mobile relocation, so that in an invasion of Western Europe, Soviet aircraft would have flown out of their depth, lacking communications with & direction/coordination from their ground based control authorities. Further, many of the frontline Soviet combat aircraft suffered high fuel consumption and short range, & their engines also suffered from manufacturing defects, poor quality control, & very short TBO (Time Between Overhaul). Had the Red Army invaded Western Europe, as it advanced Soviet tactical aircraft would have had to fly missions at increasing ranges, thus reducing their weapons loads & lengthening their mission duration, thus making them increasingly vulnerable to NATO counter-air sorties. Sure, the Red Army would have overrun NATO airfields & airports, but the Soviets would have had to rapidly rehabilitate those bases & also to supply them with operations centers, fuel, maintenance facilities - for the Soviets this would have been a logistical and communications nightmare.

Another negative factor in the Red Army was the widely varying morale of its soldiers. Huge numbers of Red Army troops were not combat trained or armed & served instead in numerous engineer units whose much put-upon enlisted ranks performed nothing but monotonous manual labor, very often for the entire duration of their obligated service. Even in combat units many Red Army soldiers were resentful of the high-handed treatment they received at the hands of their more politically zealous officers & careerist NCO's, & the endless boredom & menace laid on them by their units' embedded political commissars.

Soviet tanks were also not nearly as capable as their NATO opposite models, & Russian tanks also suffered from the same lack of quality & maintenance that other technical branches and gear of the Red Army suffered from. Except when their armored vehicles faced scant or no opposition (as in the final stages of the NVA invasion of South Vietnam), the Soviets were embarrassed by the vulnerability of their armor in Afghanistan, Iraq (Desert Storm), & in various Moslem nations' operations against superior Israeli armor, infantry antitank weapons, & anti-armor aircraft - so much so that the Soviets, & the post-Soviet Russians, took the cosmetic step of re-designating their best tanks to make them appear to foreign customers to be entirely new, improved models.

All of this, plus the deep Soviet dread of conflict with Red China in its rear, is why the USSR strove to extend its reach and influence via various revolutions & proxy wars - they knew better than to risk all on the one-shot dice roll of an invasion of NATO Europe.

"Now you're reminding me of it and making me really miss the Cold War, nuclear terror and all. "

Yup, but then we conservatives suckers were part of a team (THE WEST) with heritage that we could admire, and a future that we might hope for.Today, we realize that so many of our team members especially among the top 1% cannot wait to screw us or replace us. We thought that "winning" the Col War was a collective effort that would bond us all together for ever and lead us on together to greater heights.Boy, were we suckers.

Much of what you write is true. But don't sell them too short. The Warsaw Pact had around 50,000 tanks versus about 10,000 for NATO. And it's only about 600 miles from East Germany to the English Channel. There was a distinct possibility that a conventional attack could have resulted in the Warsaw Pact reaching the channel in short order. I don't see how they would have been stopped without tactical nukes. I remember we even came out with the Neutron bomb that was supposed to irradiate the invaders and not damage infrastructure. Although I don't know how many years it would have taken before people could move back.

As for troops, remember in the 1970s the US was pretty hollowed out. Our troop morale was low post Vietnam and it took several years into the Reagan administration to get higher quality individuals to join again in numbers. As for our allies, many such as the Dutch were joke at that time.

As far as embarrassment goes, look at the US. We've been held to a stalemate by 40K goat herders with rifles in a decade in Afghanistan. We had third world pilots, with minimal training, flying older jets giving us headaches in Vietnam.

Yes, I know we had our hands tied behind our backs, but believe it or not, the Soviets did the same to themselves in Afghanistan.

I've got a copy of Col. Trevor Dupuy's "Future Wars: The World's Most Dangerous Global Flashpoints" right by my computer. Interesting in a "zeerust" kind of way, since it was first published in 1992 and the wars are set shortly after. The imagined wars were:The sixth Arab-Israeli warThe fourth India-Pakistan warCivil war in Russia (Yelsin vs hard-liners of the old guard)The second war for Africa (South Africa transitioning away from apartheid vs Angola+Namibia again)The third Gulf war (Iraq vs Iran again)The second Korean warThe Sandanista war (Nicaragua vs Honduras, El Salvador and some U.S forces in the area)The war for Transylvania (Romania vs Hungary, the conflict I least expected on the list)Egypt's war with Libya & SudanThe Sino-Russian conflict

The world ended up being considerably more peaceful in the early 90s than Dupuy expected.

Also,as I recall,the Soviet assault was blunted,not by reservists,but by a massive bombing attack by B-52's.This attack led to an enormous attrition rate on the B-52's but,also,great collateral casualties amongst NATO forces.My memory may be faulty however.

In the heart of the Fulda Gap, the big question for me was, "Are the Russians going to start with a persistent nerve agent attack on our local dispersal areas?" If then, we are in for a world of hurt. We had 2 main planning scenarios, one which assumed we had 2-3 weeks of pre war build up. Dispersal, deployment, evacuation of dependents (NEO) and activation of the air bridge (pace Clancy) as units from Conus fell in on their pre positioned unit sets. Given all preceding we had very good odds of not even fighting. Our nightmare was No Notice.As noted above, the Russians had lots of problems themselves. The typical tank or motorized rifle regiment had 80% of its equipment in long term storage. Their logistics system was best described as austere. Unlike a western army, the Russian method was large numbers of expendable units that would be consumed in battle and replaced by waves of follow on forces. That drove our operational development of deep battle aka Air Land Battle.It was generally accepted at my level that Soviet strategy was gain as much ground as possible in the first 96 hours, and present enough of an overwhelming threat that NATO would be forced to choose between negotiation (accepting a new status quo) or using tactical nukes.Maybe we do owe a debt of gratitude to Gorby.

Communism can be enforced but it cannot be reformed. Czech communists tried to reform it in the 60s, and it just unraveled. So, Soviets had to invade and reinforce it.

Though US far out-paced the USSR, USSR need not have collapsed if Gorby hadn't tried to reform communism. Communism and political freedom cannot co-exist.

This is why both Chinese and Vietnamese communists have pushed economic freedoms without political ones.

Looking back, maybe the Soviets should have maintained political control and promoted nationalism while liberalizing only the economic sector. It might even have been better for the privatization of the Soviet economy. Capitalism needs some kind of order and rule of law. When privatization came to the USSR just when the state was collapsing, it meant gangsters could do as they wished since there was an absence of any governing structure.

In contrast, as corrupt and arbitrary as Chinese communist party can be, it still maintained some semblance of social and legal order in which market economy could take root.

"Watership Down, is an allegory of the paratroopers' terrified retreat "

Without any more supporting evidence on your part, I declare this to be utter nonsense.

I've read the book - and what Adams wrote about writing the book - and I'm very familiar with Market Garden. The two have nothing in common besides the themes of leadership and survival and that there's rivers and bridges involved. You can declare anything to be an allegory if that's the level of evidence you're using.

Honestly people don't get just how superior NATO's air power is. Sure air power isn't all thar when you are knocking over tin pot 3rd world nations but the idea that Russian tanks would have penetrated to the Netherlands seems laughable and if they had their supply lines would have been non existent. That said Gladio is pretty distinct proof that NATO assumed some nations would be overwhelmed necessitating stay behind networks, but how much of Gladio was to prepare for communist political victories rather than invasions.

The biggest weakness in Hackett's scenario, as I came to realize in the 1990s, was that while his scholarship with respect to strategy and tactics was world-class, his grasp of logistics was not. But this delusion was shared by most NATO planners, so go figure.

Here's the thing. In Hackett's WWIII, the Soviet Navy simply cannot stop the convoys (another WWII trope redone) bringing America's great material advantage (a whole armored corps) over the Atlantic, so the front gets stabilized in the nick of time. That was the point of all the REFORGER exercises in the 1970s, after all.

In reality, we had this actual NATO war in the 1990s called "Kosovo". It proved to be as slow as molasses getting two dozen Apache helicopter gunships from the US to the shore of the Adriatic--and no Russian subs were trying to intercept their transport! So we are expected to believe that President Thompson's America would be able to get three+ heavy divisions to Germany in less than two weeks?

Ralph Peters' Red Army was probably the best novelization of a 1980s Soviet versus NATO conventional war. It's a hard-fought war, and written entirely from the perspective of Soviet troops, but in the end it is a Russian victory.

One of the sideshows of Hackett's WW3 is that on the "southern" front the Soviets are actually totally successful--the Red Army rather easily overruns the entire Italian peninsula, the US Sixth Fleet and NATO's Mediterranean Command is forced to retreat to the Spanish coast, and presumably Italy's communist party seizes the government.

Hackett does not mention any activity by the 'stay-behind' GLADIO units, but notes that the Soviet garrison pointedly stays out of the cities and camps out in the countryside. When the war ends, he implies that the Eurocommunist collaborators in Italy had better have enjoyed their two week-rule, because bloody payback seems rather certain.

I think people underestimate just how panicked laser guided missiles made the soviet leadership. If anything Afghanistan represented an attempt to buck themselves up in a country sufficiently remote that the us would ignore it. What looked like a confident overbearing move to the US was really an attempt to control the onsetting panic with action.

Does anyone think that France could stand up to the Germans at Verdun today. What a stupid question NATO would crush the Russian army of today in two weeks. Moscow is more susceptible to conquest than it has been for two centuries so of course NATO isnt going to be at peak strength.

One little thing: the Soviet never had any intention of invading Western Europe. Their huge army was for defensive purposes only, to repel the expected invasion from the West. The Soviet leaders saw it as their paramount task, that 1941 would not be repeated. Yes, they were fighting the last war.

Russians still have their country and control it. Even after communism and 90s oligarchs, Russians managed to wrest control from Jews.

But white Americans are total slaves of Jewish elites and allowing the latter to fill American with third world masses and homo agenda.

So, who really won, and who really lost?

John Lukacs was right when he said USSR was not the main enemy. He said Americans should have sided with Russia against China, not the other way around. I would go further and say white Americans should have sided with Russians against globalist-Zionists, not the other way around.

US sided with China and Jews, and look what happened to white Americans? They can't even take their country back.

Interestingly as regards this whole NATO-Germany thing, the last British troops are leaving German soil and coming home. By 2019 the BAOR (British Army on The Rhine) will be dissolved. At its peak it had close to 100,000 members. It only took 30 years after the fall of the Berlin wall to get them out.

There are still well over 50,000 U.S. service members in Germany. Note how unlike London, Washington has no intention of bringing them home. I guess somebody has to protect Germany from Denmark.

WWZ was laughable for its lack of research. Artillery wouldn't work, according to Max Brooks, because the zombies were packed too close together.

A much more realistic scenario would be the Air Force finally killing off that workhorse of close air support, the A-10, in favor of the untested and unwieldy F-35 Lightning and depriving the military of one of its best weapons.

Here is a grizzly thought that passed through my brain the other day: America could survive a decapitating nuclear attack (Manhattan, DC) but China would disintegrate if Beijing and Shanghai got the same treatment.

Even if Congress, the Supreme Court, and the entire administriation were wiped out, our society would quickly reconstitute itself under the US Constitution. State governors would take the lead in setting up new elections, the White House and Capital would be rebuilt, Manhattan might or might not be rebuilt and remain the financial center (does it really matter) and our civilization would go on.

China, by contrast, would be right back where it was in the 1930's, with regional war lords duking it out for supremacy. Good-bye communist party for sure.

Not that I advocate nuclear war, but still, if we are going to think about the unthinkable, this is a useful scenario to keep in mind.

i'm getting those minuteman control room shivers just watching these again.

I was talking to some teenage kids recently and discovered that they had no idea what "nuclear war" meant. Quite a difference from my childhood. Not that we scanned the horizon daily for mushroom clouds or anything, but it was always part of the background.

My favorite nuke-hysteria movie would be Amazing Grace and Chuck. Kind of a sweet little movie, actually, about a kid whose class goes on a field trip to a missile silo (man, we never did anything that cool!) and kind of freaks out, petrified that the bombs will fall any moment. He's a star baseball player, so he gives up the sport in protest, and that gets the attention of a star NBA player (Alex English), who joins him. That draws in other pro athletes and gives the protest momentum, and gets the attention of world leaders. I don't remember the ending, but as I recall, it was actually somewhat realistic about how disarmament isn't necessarily easy or wise.

It also stars Jamie Lee Curtis -- always a good thing, though I'm pretty sure she didn't get naked in this one. Amazingly, it's not on Netflix, but Wikipedia has a page on it, so I didn't imagine it.

"Here is a grizzly thought that passed through my brain the other day: America could survive a decapitating nuclear attack (Manhattan, DC) but China would disintegrate if Beijing and Shanghai got the same treatment.

"Even if Congress, the Supreme Court, and the entire administration were wiped out, our society would quickly reconstitute itself under the US Constitution. State governors would take the lead in setting up new elections, the White House and Capital would be rebuilt, Manhattan might or might not be rebuilt and remain the financial center (does it really matter) and our civilization would go on."

--------------------------------------------------------------------

A limited nuclear war similar to that occurs in Whitler Streiber and James Kunetka's 1984 post-nuclear war novel "Warday."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warday

In "Warday," a limited, counterforce exchange takes place between the US and the USSR in October of 1988, and the novel itself is set five years after the Warday attacks. Only three cities in the United States are directly hit--New York City, Washington, D.C., and San Antonio.

"America could survive a decapitating nuclear attack (Manhattan, DC) but China would disintegrate if Beijing and Shanghai got the same treatment."

the US would survive an all out exchange with anybody. the federal government of the US, that is. and that's really all the united states is, anyway. it's just an idea we have in our heads. we act and pretend that it's a real thing, but it's not. it's not an object or a single physical place. it's just a made up imaginary concept that we live our entire lives acting as if it exists. as all political organizations are.

like the AFC or NFC in the NFL. those aren't real things. but we act like they are. a football team might be a real thing, with real humans playing with a real ball made out of leather in a real stadium made out of a million tons of real concrete. but conferences aren't real. divisions aren't real. i have to pretend you're in my division and play you twice a year because that's how we pretend. i can't just go play any team i want. in pretend land i can't challenge any opponents, only the opponents the made up fake rules allow me to challenge.

as long as enough of the cabinet survives a complete exchange of fusion missiles, locked away in an underground bunker somewhere, the united states still exists. as long as they breathe, and can command some forces, the power mongers that they are, they would NEVER give up power.

it's only until that central government is physically wiped out, by killing all those people, and the resulting break down over the next couple weeks or months, that the US does, indeed, cease to exist. simply losing 30 cities by having them vaporized in no way destroys or ends the made up, pretend thing known as the united states of america. it's a concept. not a single location or a physical thing. half of it's territory could be lost to invaders. the capital could be moved. yet it still exists.

last week i was watching the postman from 1997, thinking about stuff like that. what would it take to make the united states of america not exist anymore. technically you don't need to destroy any of it's cities. once nobody is pretending anymore that some idiot's word is the law, and every person under him no longer obeys what he says, no longer spreads his orders down the chain of command, the political entity ceases to exist.

of course, it only happens by force. nobody will voluntarily just say "No, you're just a guy. I don't care what you say anymore." it either has to be almost everybody at once saying that, like waking up from a dream, realizing we were under mind control the whole time. or, it has to be a smaller group, but large enough to violently resist. or, it has to be a cataclysmic event that inflicts so much damage on everything, indiscriminately, that the entirety of human society breaks down.

a major asteroid hit. a deadly worldwide virus. an alien invasion. an exchange of hundreds of MIRV warheads. that's what it would take. and only then, if those things got 'em. killed the great majority of the federal politicians.

"Even if Congress, the Supreme Court, and the entire administration were wiped out, our society would quickly reconstitute itself under the US Constitution."

i don't agree with this at all. in 1985, trying to put the united states back together after a nuclear exchange would make total sense. in 2014, now that we know what our rulers have in store for us, it makes no sense at all. in fact, i think something cataclysmic, like world war 3, might be the only chance we would ever have of escaping the united states federal government leviathan. finally, you have a chance to be FREE. why would you DELIBERATELY put the collar back on your neck, your ankles, and lock the chains back on your body? that's total insanity. that's bonkers. that's madness.

walking right back into the jail cell, forever putting yourself and all your descendants in the prison of a lifetime of subservience to some know nothing, do nothing, mediocrity of a person elected once every 4 years, their only goal to further tighten the noose of the cultural marxist globalist plan on your throat, your children's throat, their children's throat. until you are not even citizens anymore. but subjects. watched. monitored. taxed. physically harrassed. and finally, eliminated and physically replaced by brown people. you'd actually WANT to put the supreme court back together? so they can rule that total nonsense is actually the law of the land, and you have to obey, under threat of violence?

if world war 3 broke out now, you would have to seriously think that some factions within the US would actually start attacking the united states federal government forces within the country. this might be their only chance to directly confront the monster which wants to exterminate them. and try to break free from it. hit it from behind while it's occupied with some other enemy. make a desperate attempt to secede, and escape the crushing fist of the globalist police state immigration invasion statists.

Honestly people don't get just how superior NATO's air power is. Sure air power isn't all thar when you are knocking over tin pot 3rd world nations but the idea that Russian tanks would have penetrated to the Netherlands seems laughable and if they had their supply lines would have been non existent.

Keep in mind we are not talking about today, but rather the 1970s and 80s. As mentioned above, the Warsaw Pact had an overwhelming advantage in tanks. However, they also had an advantage in front line aircraft. And they were big, big users of anti-aircraft weaponry from AAA to numerous SAMs. In fact their anti-aircraft defenses were a huge threat to NATO aircraft.

Additionally, all the NATO airfields were obviously known, fixed targets. If the Warsaw Pact launched a surprise attack, these bases would have been targeted by conventional missiles, and would not have remained operational for long.

The Warsaw Pact conceivably could have made an Oklahoma Sooner-style land rush to take as much of Europe as possible and then waited to see if the US would have retaliated with tactical nukes or agreed to a new normal.

One can argue that our tanks and planes were individually superior. But at that time in the 1970s and 1980s, not all of our forces had M-1 Tanks, F-15s, F-16s, etc. We still had quite a bit of kit from the 1960s, and our NATO allies were in worse shape as far as modernization went. And remember the US Army was pretty worthless in the late 1970s. It wasn't put back into shape until the mid to late 1980s.

Also, in the 1970s and 1980s, I am not sure the Europeans would have wanted to trash their nations to save themselves. Think about how France, still sleepwalking from World War 1, surrendered to the Germans in 6 weeks. The Europeans in the 70s and 80s were tired of war and had lost confidence in themselves. There is a definite possibility the Western Europeans would have done the same. Heck we see it today with their crazy program of importing third worlders. I am not so sure Europe would defend itself now.

The Western advantage in air power was much larger by the late 1980s than it was at the beginning of the 1970s. Compare Israel's aircraft losses to Egypt in 1973 to Israel's air supremacy over Syria in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon in 1982.

The Western advantage in air power was much larger by the late 1980s than it was at the beginning of the 1970s. Compare Israel's aircraft losses to Egypt in 1973 to Israel's air supremacy over Syria in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon in 1982.

There are two things to this. First, the quality of the USSR aircraft compared to ours. In this case the USSR before its breakup was starting to field very capable aircraft like the Mig-29 and Su-27. Unlike their quantity-over-quality predecessors, these are very good aircraft even to this day, and have comparable or better performance to their American counterparts. If they could have fielded those in large numbers, the US would have had their hands full.

As for the cat and mouse game between aircraft and anti-aircraft systems, you are correct that by the 1980s our side was starting to have better counter measures like stealth and improved jamming which gave us an advantage over the USSR's air defense systems.

With the Israelis, and the US later in 1991, it is hard to tell how much our advantage had to do with superior equipment versus superior training and personnel. I don't think we would have been as successful facing a higher trained opponent. Arabs are tough and brave, but generally don't do well in a modern military format.

Steve is right if we are taking about the planes themselves and stealth and all that but what was really revolutionary beginning around the mid 1970s was laser guided munitions. The Soviets saw how US air power had chewed through NV armor during the Easter offensive and came away terrified. Going into 1972 everyone had assume South Vietnam was done for but so effective was US bombing that they halted the advance. I think it is in the book Dynamics of Military Revolution where they go into detail about just how intimidated by LGBs the Soviet military leadership had become.

Simply put without Watergate and the Democratic congresses refusal to accede to Ford's request for air power assistance to South Vietnam would still be a country today.

Any Russian tank advance was likely going to adsorb the same kind of pummeling without the monsoon weather that tripped up air-ground support in the early months of the Easter Offensive.

Right, smart bombs arrived in 1972, which made a big difference. Before smart bombs, blowing up a railroad bridge involved many raids with many planes shot down and pilots captured. Congress's vote in 1974-75 to cut loose South Vietnam made sense from the point of view of the sizable losses American airpower absorbed over Vietnam in the 1960s, but seems nuts from the perspective of the utter dominance American airpower had achieved by 1991. The truth in 1975 would have been somewhere in between.

Targeted bombs and missiles were especially useful at taking out big radar installations, thus blinding the enemy's air defenses.

Any Russian tank advance was likely going to adsorb the same kind of pummeling without the monsoon weather that tripped up air-ground support in the early months of the Easter Offensive.

You still need air superiority to enable your attack planes with smart munitions to come into range to attack those tanks without being harassed by enemy fighters and air defenses. We hit the NV when they were only able to scramble a few older Migs. We would not have been able to do the same to the Warsaw Pact until we cleared out most of their aircraft. How long would this have taken? Weeks, months maybe? In the meantime the air bases that the NATO planes were using would have come under constant attack from enemy aircraft and long range missiles. So I don't know how many days or weeks our aircraft based in Europe would have been able to operate.

The nuclear threat was the only thing that could have prevented the taking of Western Europe. There is no way we could have held them off conventionally.

Anon and our NATO allies were in worse shape as far as modernization went

W.Germany had the Leopard I tank, easily as good, if not better than the M-60 that equipped US forces until the M-1 arrived in the 80s. Britain had the Chieftain, pretty much the best tank in the world until the M-1.

Here's the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: "You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps." You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.

You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.

Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone -- the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).

Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google's free Gmail email service. Here'show to do it.

(Non-tax deductible.)

Fourth: if you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay. Just tell WF SurePay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). (Non-tax deductible.)

Fifth: if you have a Chase bank account (or, theoretically,other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com -- replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it's Steven Sailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.)

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